Good work on the International. How / why did you end up with it in two halves?
I found it in a scrap yard like that. It originally had a loader on – it was coming out of a field and another vehicle hit the loader, which wasn’t high enough, and snapped the tractor in half. Damage was a broken engine block, front differential, glass door and the ‘tombstone’ that the front axle connects to. Insurance co wrote it off as a new engine was about £10k.
I bought it for £2k and sourced a replacement block, diff and tombstone from a burnt out tractor in Devon. I took the engine off and had it rebuilt into the replacement block by an International dealer head engineer for £200. Refitted the engine with a new clutch (while it was all apart), attached the tombstone and the front axle and started it up!
I didn’t have a key initially and the dashboard is digital so had no idea how many hours it had done or whether the hydraulics worked (big risk) – turns out everything worked and the engine had only done 1700 hours, which is very low indeed 🙂
The only thing that I got wrong was the power steering – when I started it up and turned the wheel left, the wheels turned right becuase I had the hoses on the wrong way round!!
This is my third tractor. There was a seized David Brown 850 at the property when we bought it (got that going and used for 12 months before selling it) and then a smaller International without a cab (becuase it had rotted). This is far more tractor than I need but I like being out of the wind while cutting the grass in my paddocks.
😳
Tractors built pre-2000 are fairly basic (apart from the hydraulics) and easy to work on, it’s just that everything is much heavier than on a car.